A day or two later I had an opportunity of observing more closely the hero of fifty years of mimic life. It was in the green-room of the Ambigu, half an hour before the curtain rose on his fiftieth performance of the _portier_, and the old man was in his shirt-sleeves and with his apparel otherwise disordered. Learning that we were from America, he invited us to sit for a moment in his dressing-room, which adjoined the green-room, and waved us toward the door with as grand a gesture as if he were Hamlet saying "Lead on! I'll follow thee." The dressing-room was a pleasant little box (in French stage-parlance, by the way, a player's dressing-room is always called his _loge_), with the walls covered with portraits of theatrical and other celebrities. The impression Lemaitre made on me at this time was more that which might be made by an American statesman of the old school--a Clay, a Webster, an Adams--than that one would expect from a mere mouther of other people's words. However, I am wrong to apply this term to Lemaitre, who was in the truest sense an _author_. But of this later. He was full of a sort of sad dignity, and the burden of his conversation was, "I am no longer young." He inquired curiously concerning America, but when it was suggested that he should visit our country, shook his head: "No; I am too old to cross the sea now." The above passage from Dickens was referred to, but he had never heard of it: he said, however, that Monsieur Dickens had once sent him some novels to read, and by his tone did not imply that he was at all flattered by the admiration of the Englishman. For in truth Lemaitre was already a spoiled child of adulation years before Charles Dickens became famous; and now that Dickens was nearly four years dead, the old actor still lived, and remembered that every admiring adjective known to the French language had been showered upon himself: what mattered a few more in the English language? Looking in the tired, watery old eyes of the man sitting before me with his hands thrust deep in his pockets--and what magnificent, fiery, great black billiard-balls of eyes they must have been in his youth!--looking at the skinny folds which years had gathered about his aged jaws, it was still, strange to say, perfectly easy to realize the fascinating man Lemaitre had been in his prime, the tremendous power for swaying the emotions of his auditors which once abode in that rugged frame.